(I interviewed the author of Haiti Fights Back: The Life and Legacy of Charlemagne Péralte, which can be found here.)
This second reading is nothing less than a conscientious effort to weave together the manifold strands of Charlemagne Péralte’s remarkable and harrowing life—a fractured life to be sure, reduced to a series of grim and tragic tableaux: his arrest, his untimely demise, and the shocking public exhibition of his mortal remains. Such moments, though indelibly etched into the collective Haitian memory, failed entirely to account for the full scope of the man, whose existence and legacy reverberate far beyond those singular events. This book tries (and mostly succeeds) to illuminate the entirety of Péralte’s trajectory, from his birth in 1885 to his extraordinary resurrection in the imagination of his Haitian compatriots well into the twenty-first century.
Dr. Yveline Alexis, with no small measure of intellectual courage and emotional clarity, places before us a tapestry of voices that speak not only from the soil of Haiti but also from the distant corridors of American power. It is within this dialogue, fraught and layered, that Péralte emerges anew—not as a relic of the past but as a figure continually reshaped and reimagined. Through the intimate juxtaposition of Péralte’s own writings from 1918 and the haunting recollections of his granddaughter nearly a century later, Alexis reveals the persistent ingenuity with which his story has been preserved and reinterpreted by those who refuse to let him be forgotten.
Yet her project’s significance lies not merely in its careful excavation of memory but in its subtle, unyielding insistence on the double meaning of Péralte’s legacy. For his story, as told and retold by the Haitian people, carries with it a quiet but profound reproach: a condemnation of the foreign forces that sought to impose their will upon a nation, and an exaltation of the defiance that rose in their wake. In this, Alexis achieves not merely an act of historical recovery but a meditation on the enduring power of resistance, on the capacity of a people to transform pain into meaning, and on the infinite complexity of memory itself. Here is history rendered luminous, a testament to both the fragility and the indomitability of the human spirit.
Key term(s): Voye wòch, kache men
